FEELMOST – Free Energy Engineering for Liquid Molecular Solar Thermal Storage

Research question

 The sun is one of the most abundant sources of renewable energy, and the share of solar energy from renewable sources steadily increases. In this context, solar energy storage solutions based on battery technologies or power-to-X technologies offer emission-free energy on demand, but also require, in most cases, rare or depletable raw materials. An alternative way of storing solar energy is to use photoswitchable molecules, which in this context are being referred to as molecular solar thermal storage (MOST) materials or solar thermal fuels. The main goal of the FEELMOST project is to guide the development of MOST materials by designing the free energy landscapes of ground and excited states using machine learned models and atomic scale simulations.
 

Sustainability aspects

This technology can make important contributions to a sustainable energy economy enabling decentralized energy harvesting, storage, and delivery. Crucially, these materials can be sustainably synthesized from earth-abundant materials avoiding rare, toxic and ethically problematic elements.